Get political - part b

Over the past several months, I have had my homepage set to the BBC. Sometimes it makes no effect whatsoever; like when the internet is so slow that I just stop it to get to what I really need to do or when I am just in a hurry. Even when I do not take the time to actually read articles, I still find it beneficial to at least glance at the headlines to see what has been going on the world. Then when I do take the time to read the news, I have a better background to know what kinds of things have been going on for a couple days or if they just happened.

For instance, over Thanksgiving weekend, I was not on my computer very much, but the few times I was, I noticed that something was going on in Mumbai, India. I was busy during that time, but when I returned to school, I was able to take the time to read up on the issue. If I hadn't known that there had been an ongoing hostage crisis, I probably wouldn't have taken the time to read several articles about that subject. Now that I am more well read on the issue, articles on this topic are more likely to pique my interest. Just today, I saw an article entitled "Are Mumbai attacks a chance for peace?" Even though the article is above my head in terms of the background knowledge needed for the article to be of much worth, I believe that the more you know about news, the more you will continue to find out.

Another one of my favorite features on BBC is the "most read" or "most emailed" stories. Sometimes they are quite indicative of major political events that are transpiring, other times, they are much more trivial. For example, the third most read article today is "Google tells us what we look for." Is this article critical to the functioning of the world? No, but it is interesting. Another nice feature is that when there is a news item that has been covered multiple times, BBC includes a column of stories that help to provide the reader with background information and other articles that were previously published. For someone like me, who struggles to read the news on a daily basis, this feature helps me to catch up with what is going on before I read the day's events. Though reading the news is something I am interested in, it is not always something that is placed as a high priority.